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@Gordon Thanks for that, Gordon. It was all a bit late minute last night and I couldn't find the red button you mention despite having the latest version of the software. I'll prepare more thoroughly next time. But one thing I'm delighted to see is that Canon did listen to us and provided a software override of te AF/MF switch on the lens.

@popo Luckily I have a "Pro" version of vReveal which I remembered after an abortive attempt with "SUPER" which failed due to a codec incompatibility with RegiStax. vReveal uses my GPU and it races through the MOV to AVI conversion.

Those are very nice images Bob - the second one is also preferrable in my view...

Hi Gordon,

Being the gent you are you preferred not to pass comment on that bright halo which surrounded all but the left quadrant of the image. As I understand it that's an artifact that RegiStax may have introduced though it's also quite possible that I made it worse with subsequent post-processing. Anyway, I used PhotoShop's magnetic lasso to outline the affected portions of the rim and then, by judicious expansion and contraction of that selection and saving the intermediate selections managed to select just the halo which I then cleared to black. The limb then needed a bit more cosmetic work filling in a couple of artificial depressions and the final result (the final final result, I hope) is presented below:

Thanks Bob, a quick scan of the free version feature list suggests that simple conversion to avi is available in that, so I'll have to try that later.

In the mean time I did have the same problem you did, that my first attempt at mov to avi had assorted woes due to registax unreadable codecs, or others which were far too lossy. I eventually works around this by converting one unreadable codec into yet another one, which registax would swallow.

Oh, how I have forgotten how much I dislike the registax interface until using it again now Even Iris seems more intuitive in comparison! Relearning where everything is and how it works now... don't know if I'll have an output before bedtime.

I'm waving a white flag for the project for now. Looking at Bob's pics again, I failed to appreciate the level of detail in them earlier. My efforts are not even close on this occasion. I haven't managed to play well with registax yet, so possibly I can improve on my output through processing, but individual frames don't look that nice. What I have is nice enough viewed in isolation, but side by side, it looks like a blurry mess.

I thought it might be instructive to offer a very short clip (1 second = 24 frames and looping forever) plucked essentially at random from the original footage. It's includes the crater Plato, towards the top of the full image, and I've magnified it by a factor of four so that the effects of atmospheric turbulence and image noise can be more easily seen. The file size is approximately 900 KB so my apologies to those of you with slower Internet connections.

The "seeing" wasn't bad that night but the clip is long enough (just) to show that some frames are sharper than others and even when sharp the whole caboodle is wobbling around. Programs like RegiStax certainly have their work cut out in selecting the best frames and attempting to align the features on the whole image with an accuracy that then allows sharpening during post processing to bring out genuine detail rather than image processing artefacts.

Nice bit of wobble there. On a similar note I was thinking of putting some videos on vimeo showing the same.

This thread did also raise another point. I'll continue in another post later, but the right processing can make a big difference. I quickly revisited my "best ever" moon shot from 2 years ago, and with the processing techniques I use today, I think I can do a lot better in the output.

I've been doing sums! Simple ones this time but I asked myself what was the best I was ever likely to achieve. I have a 70mm diameter objective lens on my telescope and the resolution limit (Dawe's limit) is just 1.66 arcseconds under perfect conditions. Depending on its exact distance from the Earth the Moon subtends an angle of between 29.3 to 34.1 minutes of arc. Say it's 30 which equals 1800 arcseconds. So at best I can resolve pairs of objects no further than 1.66/1800 of the diameter of the Moon apart. That's about 1/1086th the diameter of the Moon. Bizarrely enough the HD video from my 5D Mark II has 1080 pixels as it's smallest dimension so, in the case of a full Moon the pixel count almost exactly matches the resolution of my 'scope.

Arguably the sensor should have twice as many pixels (2192) in its final output (after pixel binning from the 21MP sensor) to be sure of sampling the image perfectly but that's assuming perfect optics, perfect focussing and perfect seeing. I don't know whether to be happy I've got within a factor of about two of the theoretical best performance, judged by looking at the RegiStax raw output, or sad that to see much more I'd need a bigger telescope, something that I occasionally think I'd like but then step back from when I work out the cost and logistics.

As an aside, when viewing the telescope's output with the magnification necessary to get the Moon to fill the width of the sensor the diffraction limit implies that the scope can resolve 1086 objects across the 3744 pixels in the smallest dimension of the 5D2 sensor. That means the Airy disk covers about nine pixels and explains why best focus using a magnified Live View screen on my notebook computer still looks fuzzy.

Guys, Im really into wide-field astrophotography, but do you think I have to skip a 50D and go for the 7D for that videocapability alone? Or could I just better stack some RAWs?
Im not going to image the Moon very often, and if Id do it, Ill do it with the webcam to get better pictures of the craters!
So, do you think it's a must-have? Im not so sure but I find it quite interesting to see what you can do...

W-e-e-l-l-l, this has been attracting my attention over the last couple of days ...

Totally over the top and I'm sure I'd end up feeling guilty using it just for fun and an occasional photograph. But it actually wouldn't cost much different from a Leica M10 (or M9 if that's still current) plus the couple of lenses that I'd sort of promised myself for my sixtieth next year and, despite not having the best clear skies statistics in the country, I might even get more use out of it. I've been interested in astronomy all my life (it might even have been a career choice in different circumstances) so maybe I should own one top of the range 'scope before I kick the bucket. But I'd better get into training as, while it breaks down into manageable chunks for assembly and disassembly, the thought of dropping the OTA doesn't bear thinking about.

But I'm veering off-topic for this thread until, and if, such a time as I can display my first prime focus image from such a sweet piece of kit.

Off the top of my head I'd say a webcam is a better choice for lunar or planetary imaging via the "movie" route as the pixel pitch should be smaller than a 7D after pixel binning to 1080p but you'd have to check that. That means you can use a shorter focal length telescope. And for non-planetary astrophotography you'd be better stacking regular RAW files from a DSLR or dedicated sensor.